Sept. 2, 1875] 



NATURE 



Z^Z 



Matters would le very clilTert nt when the craniographer came 

 to deal with a mixed race like our own, or like the population of 

 Switzerland, the investigation into the craniology of which has 

 resulted in the production of the invaluable " Crania Helvetica" 

 of His and Riitimeyer. At once, upon the first inspection of a 

 series of crania, cr, indeed, of heads, from such a race, it is 

 evident some are referable to one, some to another, of one, two, 

 or three typical forms, and that a residue remains whose exist- 

 ence and character is perhaps explained and expressed by calling 

 them "Mischformen." Then arises a most interesting question 

 — Has the result of intercrossing been such as to give a 

 preponderance to these " Mischformen ? " or has it not rather 

 been such as in the ultimate resort, whilst still testified 

 to by the presence of intermediating and interconnecting links, 

 to have left the originally distinct forms still in something 

 like their original independence, and in the posEession of an 

 overwhelmed numerical representation ? The latter of these two 

 alternative possibilities is certainly often to be seen realised within 

 the hmits of a modern so-called "English" or so-called "British" 

 family ; and His has laid this down as bting the result of the 

 investigations above mentioned into the ethnology of Switzer- 

 land, At the same time it is of cardinal importance to note that 

 His has recorded, though only in a footnote, that the skulls 

 which combine the characters of his two best-defined types, the 

 " Sion-Typus " to wit, and the " Ditentis-Typus," in the 

 " Mischform," which he calls " Sion-Disentis Mischlinge," are 

 the most capacious of the entire series of the "Crania Hel- 

 vetica," exceeding, not by their maximum only, but by tlieir 

 average capacity also, the corresponding capacities of every one 

 of the pure Swiss types.* Intercrossing, therefore, is an agency 

 which in one set of cases may operate in the way of enhancing 

 individual evolution, whilst in another it so divides its influence 

 as to allow of the maintenance of two types in their distinctness. 

 Both these results are of equal biological, the latter is of pre- 

 eminent archceological, interest. Retziusf was of opinion, and 

 with a few qualifications I tb.ink more recent Swedish ethnolo- 

 gists would agree, that the modern dolichocephalic Swedish cra- 

 nium was very closely affined to, if not an exact reproduction of 

 the Swedish cranium of the Stone period ; and VirchowJ holds 

 that the modem brachycephalic Danish skull is similarly related 

 to the Danish skull of the «ame period. There can be no doubt 

 that the Swedish cranium is very closely similar indeed to the 

 Anglo-Saxon ; and the skulls which still conform to that type 

 amongst us will be by most men supposed to be the legitimate 

 representatives of the followers of Hengest and Horsa, just as 

 the modem Swedes, whose country has been less subjected to 

 disturbing agencies, must be held to be the lineal descendants of 

 the original occupiers of their soil. I am inclined to think that 

 the permanence of the brachycephalic stock and type in Den- 

 mark has also its bearing upon the ethnography of this country. 

 In the Round-Barrow or Bronze period in this country, sub- 

 spheroidal crania (that is to say, crania of a totally ditferent 

 shape and type from those which are found in exclusive posses- 

 sion of the older and longer barrows) are found in great abun- 

 dance, sometimes, as in the south, in exclusive possession of the 

 sepulchre, sometimes in company, as in the north, with skulls of 

 the older type. The skulls are often strikingly like those of the 

 same type from the Danish tumuli. On this coincidence I 

 should not stake much, were it not confirmed by other indica- 

 tions. And foremost amongst these indications I should place 

 the fact of the " Tree-interments," as they have been called — 

 interments, that is, in coffins made out of the trunk of a tree of 

 this country, and of Denmark, being so closely alike. The well- 

 known monoxylic coffin from Grisihorpe contained, together 

 with other relics closely similar to the relics found at Treenhoi, 

 in South Jutland, in a similar coffin, a skull which, as I can 

 testify from a cast given me by my friend Mr. H. S. Harland, 

 might very well pass for that of a brachycephalic Dane of 

 the Neolithic period. Canon Greenwell diiCuvered a similar 



Baden who, when they first saw theip, said all the Baskhirs in a regiment 

 brought up to the Rhine in 18x3 by the Russians were as like to each other 

 as twins, found, in the course of a few weeks, that they could distinj^uish 

 them readily and sharply enough (Crania Germanix Occid. p. 2 ; Archiv fiir 

 Anthrop. v. p. 485, 1872). And real naturalists, such as IHr. Bates, prac- 

 tised in the discrimination of zoological differences, express themselves as 

 struck rather with the amount of unlikeness than with that of likeness which 

 prevails amongst savage tibes of the greatest simplicity of life and the most 

 entire Ireedom from crossing with other races. But these observations relate 

 to the living heads, not to the skulls. 



* See Dr. Beddoe, Mem. Soc. Anth. Lond. iii. p. 532 ; Huth, p. 308, 

 1875 ; D. Wilson, cit. Brace, "Races of the Old World," p. 380. 



+ " Ethnologische Schriften," p. 7. 



X "Archiv fiir Anthropologie," iv. pp. 71 and 80. 



monoxylic coffin at Skipton, in Yorkshire ; and two others have 

 been recorded from the same county, one from the neighbour- 

 hood of Driffield, the other from that of Thornborough. 



Col. Lane Fox is of opinion that the earthworks which form 

 such striking objects for inquiry here and there on the East 

 Riding Wolds must, considering that the art of war has been 

 the same in its broad features in all ages, have been thrown up 

 by an invading force advancing from the east coast. Now, we 

 do know that England was not only made England by immigra- 

 tion from that corner or angle where the Cimbric Peninsula joins 

 the main land, but that long after that change of her name this 

 country was successlully invaded from that peninsula itself. 

 And what Swegen and Cnut did some four hundred and fifty 

 years after the time of Hengest and Horsa, it is not unreasonable 

 to suppose other warriors and other tribes from the same locality 

 may have done perhaps twice or thrice as many centuries further 

 back in time than the Saxon Conquest. The huge proportions 

 of the Cimbri, Teutones, and Ambroncs, are just what the skele- 

 tons of the British Round-Barrow folk enable us now to repro- 

 duce for ourselves. It is much to be regretted that from the vast 

 slaughters of Aquse Sextise and Vercella; no relics have beea 

 preserved which might have enabled us to say whether 

 Boiorix and his companions had the cephalic proportions of 

 Neolithic Danes, or those very different contours which we 

 are familiar with from Saxon graves throughout England, and 

 from the so-called "Danes' graves" of Yorkshire. Whatever 

 might be the result of such a discovery and such a comparison, I 

 think it would in neither event justify the application of the 

 term " Kymric" to the particular form of skuUto which Retzius 

 and Broca have assigned it. 



Some years ago I noticed the absence of the brachycephalic 

 British type of skull from an extensive series of Romano- British 

 skulls which had come into my hands ; and subsequently to my 

 doing this. Canon Greenwell pointed out to me that such skulls 

 as we had from late Celtic cemeteries, belonging to the compara- 

 tively short period which elapsed between the end of the Bronze 

 period and the establishment of Roman rule in Great Britain, 

 seemed to have reverted mostly to the prse-Bronze dolichoce- 

 phalic type. This latter type, the " kumbecephalic type" of 

 Prof. Daniel Wilson, maniests a singular vitality, as the late 

 and much lamented Prof. Phillips pointed out long ago at a 

 meeting of this Association held at Swansea — the dark-haired 

 variety, which is very ordinarily the longer-headed and the 

 shorter-statured variety of our countrymen being represented in 

 very great abundance in those regions of England which can be 

 shown, by irrefragable and multifold evidence, to have been most 

 thoroughly permeated, imbibed, and metamorphosed by the in- 

 fusion of Saxons and Danes in the districts, to wit, of Derby, 

 Leice.ster, Stamford, and Loughborough. How and in what 

 way this type of man, one to which some of the most raluabl* 

 men now bearing the name of Enghshmen, which they once 

 abhorred, belong, has contrived to reassert itself, we may, if I 

 am rightly informed, hear some discussion in this department. 

 Before leaving this part of my subject I would say that the 

 Danish type of head still survives amongst us ; but it is to my 

 thinking not by any means so common, at least in the mid- 

 land counties, as the dark- haired type of which we have just 

 been speaking. And I would add that I hope I may find that 

 the views which I have here hinted at will be found to be in 

 accord with the extensive researches of Dr. Beddoe, a gentleman 

 who worthily represents and upholds the interests of anthro- 

 pology in this city, the city of Prichard, and who is considered 

 to be more or less disqualified for occupying the post which I 

 now hold, mainly from the fact that he has occupied it before, 

 and that the rules of the British Association, like the laws of 

 England, have more or less of an abhorrence of perpetuities. 



The largest result which craniometry and cubage of skulls 

 have attained is, to my thinking, the demonstration of the fol- 

 lowing facts, viz. : — first, that the cubical contents of many 

 skulls from the earliest sepultures from which we have any skulls 

 at all, are larger considerably than the average cubical contents 

 of modem European skulls ; and secondly, that the female skulls 

 of those times did not contrast to that disadvantage with the 

 skulls of their male contemporaries which the average female 

 skulls of modern days do, when subjected to a similar com- 

 parison.* Dr. Thurnam demonstrated the former of these facts, 

 as regards the skulls from the Long and the Round Barrows of 



* The subequality of the male and female skulls in the less civilised of 

 modem races was pointed out as long ago as 1845 by Retzius, in MiilUr'c 

 " Archiv," p. 89, and was comiaented upon by Husclkke, of Jena, im hit 

 " Schadel, Him, und Seele," pp. 48-51, in 1834. 



